« Sentence of the Day | Main | Cleveland »
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies at 89
Here is one obituary. He did not in every way favor liberty, but he did more for liberty than almost any other person of the late 20th century. I find First Circle and Cancer Ward to be his best fiction, although they are not his most widely read works.
That said, I don't favor nationalizing his funeral, as that would give the impression that Russia is now a free country.
Here is a piece on the economics of Solzhenitsyn, by the excellent Cecil Bohanon; Cecil was at the Liberty Fund conference with me.
Addendum: Read Bryan Caplan: "But if any writer can make future generations of Russians look on the Soviet era with the horror it deserves, it's the man who stared down the Soviet Union at the height of its power - and outlived it by 17 years."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 3, 2008 at 07:41 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
I hope this will spark a general revival of his life and work that will reach some of the many people that still don't know about him.
Posted by: Unit at Aug 3, 2008 7:55:36 PM
I guess that means you can't say "Why can't the oldest-living Nobel laureate get his book published in English?" anymore.
Posted by: TGGP at Aug 3, 2008 7:56:37 PM
His 89 years must be nearly an unprecedented feat for both a gulag and cancer survivor.
Posted by: M. Hodak at Aug 3, 2008 9:05:39 PM
He was less than "not in every way" in favor of liberty. He was quite happy for authoritarianism so long as it was traditionally Russian. He was irrationalist and favored mysticism. His objections to communism were it's rationalism and it's not being "authentically Russian." While he surely would have had objections of some sorts to the current government of Russia the lack of freedom there would not be among them. He certainly would have favored the nationalist rhetoric, including the dangerous xenophobic sort, now often pushed by authorities. He wasn't a friend of liberty at all, however good his virtues might otherwise have been.
Posted by: Matt at Aug 3, 2008 11:03:04 PM
"That said, I don't favor nationalizing his funeral, as that would give the impression that Russia is now a free country."
What an interesting sentence: nationalization = freedom.
Posted by: meter at Aug 4, 2008 9:34:51 AM
I second The First Circle and The Cancer Ward. The Oak and the Calf is also very good. Does any of qualify as "fiction" though?
Posted by: sd at Aug 4, 2008 10:20:28 AM
89 despite the gulag, cancer and relentless criticism of everyone, east and west....this guy's life is surely the best argument ever for the power of negative thinking.
Posted by: Diana at Aug 4, 2008 1:23:33 PM
Here's an interesting economics question: Why couldn't the world's most famous living author get his most important late work published in America? The first volume of Solzhenitsyn's "Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995" appeared in Russia in 2001 and was published in Paris in a French translation in 2002, yet it has never been published by a major New York publishing house?
Any theories?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 4, 2008 1:45:16 PM
Gee Steve, maybe it was a Jewish conspiracy that kept it from being published here? Or maybe the fact that it's a deeply anti-semitic work of dubious historical accuracy by a man who was increasingly showing his hatred for modernity and rationality and his love of atavistic nationalism made most publishers think it wasn't likely to be a good bet for them. That's what I'd put my money on, anyway.
Posted by: matt at Aug 4, 2008 5:49:52 PM
Gee, Matt, thanks for your expert in-depth opinion on books that you haven't had a chance to read because they haven't been published here!
For anybody who wants to read excerpts from excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's books that can't get published in America, check out:
http://tinyurl.com/6gqnf4
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 4, 2008 9:42:43 PM
Good post, Matt.
Russia is in no way a free country today and Solzhenitsyn was fine with that. He was a huge fan of Putin and the new version of the Pioneers - a group called "Nashi". That translates to "Ours". The closest equivalent I can think of in the U.S. is the KKK. That said, Solzhenitsyn's work was important in exposing the cruelty of communism to the West, where intellectuals were swooning over the promise of communism.
Posted by: Methinks at Aug 4, 2008 10:49:49 PM
Steve, did it ever occur to you that some people can read Russian? Maybe that even some people lived in Russia around the time when the book came out? We all know your a racist but it seems you're stupid, too.
Posted by: Matt at Aug 4, 2008 11:29:04 PM
Those who can't read Russian might also check out Ilya Somin's good post on the Volokh conspiracy. The summary of "200 years" (which Somin has also read) is thus:
"For example in one of his last books, Two Hundred Years Together, Solzhenitsyn made the absurd claim that the czarist-era Russian government was not anti-Semitic and that Russian Jews bear as much or more blame than Russian gentiles do for the historic conflicts between the two groups. As Cathy Young has pointed out, in view of the czarist state's "systematic oppression and violence" against the Jews, this is "a bit like asking blacks to accept their share of blame for Jim Crow.""
Since Steve is a racist he might not take that last bit so hard, though.
Posted by: Matt at Aug 4, 2008 11:44:55 PM
Yes, of course, in any dispute between Cathy Young and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, all right thinking people must take Cathy Young's word for it. Just look at their track records! There's no need to read what Solzhenitsyn has written. In fact, it's best if nobody in America is allowed to read it!
Seriously, allow me to reprint a more disinterested view than Cathy Young's:
Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution
Nobel laureate under fire for new book on the role of Jews in Soviet-era repression
* Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
* The Guardian,
* Saturday January 25 2003
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.
In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.
But Jewish leaders and some historians have reacted furiously to the book, and questioned Solzhenitsyn's motives in writing it, accusing him of factual inaccuracies and of fanning the flames of anti-semitism in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn argues that some Jewish satire of the revolutionary period "consciously or unconsciously descends on the Russians" as being behind the genocide. But he states that all the nation's ethnic groups must share the blame, and that people shy away from speaking the truth about the Jewish experience.
In one remark which infuriated Russian Jews, he wrote: "If I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw - their life was softer than that of others."
Yet he added: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."
Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, spent much of his life in Soviet prison camps, enduring persecution when he wrote about his experiences. He is currently in frail health, but in an interview given last month he said that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides - and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.
"My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews - their spiritual component," he said. "I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us."
But Solzhenitsyn's book has caused controversy in Russia, where one Jewish leader said it was "not of any merit".
"This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," said Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews.
"This is not a book about how the Jews and Russians lived together for 200 years, but one about how they lived apart after finding themselves on the same territory. This book is a weak one professionally. Factually, it is so bad as to be beyond criticism. As literature, it is not of any merit."
But DM Thomas, one of Solzhenitsyn's biographers, said that he did not think the book was fuelled by anti-semitism. "I would not doubt his sincerity. He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel. In his fiction and factual writing there are Jewish characters that he writes about who are bright, decent, anti-Stalinist people."
Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history, said that from what he had read about the book, Solzhenitsyn was "absolutely right".
Researching a book on Lenin, Prof Service came across details of how Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin, asked the politburo in 1919 to ensure that Jews were enrolled in the Red army. Trotsky said that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka.
"Trotsky's idea was that the spread of anti-semitism was [partly down to] objections about their entrance into the civil service. There is something in this; that they were not just passive spectators of the revolution. They were part-victims and part-perpetrators.
"It is not a question that anyone can write about without a huge amount of bravery, and [it] needs doing in Russia because the Jews are quite often written about by fanatics. Mr Solzhenitsyn's book seems much more measured than that."
Yet others failed to see the need for Solzhenitsyn's pursuit of this particular subject at present. Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), said: "The question of ethnicity did not have any importance either in the revolution or the story of the NKVD. This was a social revolution and those who served in the NKVD and cheka were serving ideas of social change.
"If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 5, 2008 2:15:35 PM
Steve Sailor,
All this is overly simplified as well. It assumes that history began in 1917. Like Solzhenitsyn, I can only write from my own experience - especially since no reliable data is available from the Soviet era.
I'm Russian and I'm half Jewish and half Slavic. My Jewish great grandfather was one of the original members of the Checka in Derzhinsk. Pogroms existed long before the revolution and one of the worst and most persistent antisemitic conspiracy theories, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was written by Russians to fan the flames of antisemitism. Claiming that antisemitic feelings among Slavic Russians stems from their participation in the rise of the Soviet Union is simply a lie. It is not surprising that an untested ideology promising equality appealed to many (but not all) Jews. Incidentally, the Cheka then arrested my great grandfather for a typical trumped up charge. That's when it dawned on him that Soviets were even worse than the Czar.
But the life of Jews was in no way "softer" in Soviet Russia. They were denied work and entry to college because (and they said it explicitly) they were "Dirty Jews". After my purely slavic mother married my father, she was denied work because she married a "dirty Jew". That's to say nothing of the constant harassing question: "what's a pretty Russian girl like you doing married to a Jew?"
Then there's the perception of what is racist and what is not. Americans view judgment based on race or religion as always discriminatory. Slavs do not. BTW, in America we're all Russian to you, but in Russia, we're "Russians" and "Jews" and both Slavs and Jews follow that convention. Slavs have absolutely no problem with discrimination based on race and religion. If you're not a Slav, you're inferior. It's as simple as that and Solzhenitsyn embodied that attitude - racist in the West, perfectly normal in Russia.
This has not changed. My aunt reports a story from Moscow which did not make it to the international press. A 9-year old girl from the Caucuses was run down and brutally beaten to death by a posse of nationalist men. During the trial, news camera did "man on the street" interviews about the case. The most common response was "while it's regrettable, I can understand how they feel because the blacks (a derogatory name for people with any bloody pigmentation in their skin) are coming here and taking all our jobs. This kind of thing will happen." The men were acquitted (all it takes is out-bribing the prosecutor) Needless to say my aunt, a Slav, was nauseated. On the other hand, other members of my Slavic family are openly racist and don't even notice it.
Solzhenitsyn's attitude toward Jews mirrored the attitude of most Christian Slavs. That said, both my Jewish relatives and my Slavic relatives hold him in high esteem because he exposed the evils of the Soviet Union. In the order of priorities, this was a higher priority to them than any underlying antisemitic feelings he might have. It's complicated. But you can't possibly make the claim that Russian antisemitism in any way stems from Jewish contribution to the rise of the Soviet Union.
Posted by: Methinks at Aug 6, 2008 12:42:39 PM
Methinks, may be - horosh veshat lyudyam lapshu na ushi - and to spread your disinformation, huh?! Pedestrian low-intelligence no-knowledge wimps like you make this world the mess like it is today by allowing it to be run by jewish supremasists who are roaring with laughter at how easy they get away with it all. But let's address some of your points, shall we?
1) Exactly, let's look deeper into the history and try to understand WHY is it exactly that only jews are treated this way all over the world? Why were they expelled from every country they ever lived in? Why were there pogroms in the Czarist's Russia? For some unswers you might refer to the speech of Bejamin Franklin who was violently against the jewith immigration into the U.S. forewarning the Americans that about the fact thay jews were parasitic element or a state within the state in every country they ever lived destroying it within kicked out over 100 countries and that eventually in 200 years they would own and run the U.S. - prophetic speech for anyone who understands that today the media, Hollywood, banking/finance and politics are controlled and run by the jews in the U.S. For a stron outcry further refer to Henry Ford's book International Jew.
Most importantly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are as authentic as they get. Stop spreading the typical jew manipulation lie that they are fabricated.
"It is a rude parody-like rendering of a satanic, subtle and well-thought out plan, wrote the Nobel Prise winning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his (written in 1966 and published in 2001) analysis of the Protocols. "The Protocols show a blueprint of a social system. Its design is well above abilities of an ordinary mind, including that of its publisher. It is a dynamic process of two stages, of destabilization, increasing freedom and liberalism, which is terminated in social cataclysm, and on the second stage, new hierarchical restructuring of society takes place. It is more complicated than a nuclear bomb. It could be a stolen and distorted plan designed by a mind of genius. Its putrid style of an anti-Semitic grubby brochure [intentionally] obscures the great strength of thought and insight" .
ALL OF THE 24 PROTOCOLS HAVE BEEN REALISED ALMOST TO COMPLETION!
Protocols are only compared to the Bible in their importance as they present the plan for the New World Order domination by the jewish and international elite. They have been discredited, talked down and neglected only through extreme hard work and manipulation on the part of the international jewish community.
Analysis of authens.:
http://www.savethemales.ca/000298.html
I very much look forward to being able to read Solzhenitsin's analysis of the Protocols. The author, who was not afraid to expose the Gulag system of the Jewish Bolshevik Russia, asked that his work on Protocols be published strictly after his death - this speaks volumes...
2) That story about the Tajik 9 year old girld murdered in the streets of St.Pete made rounds and rounds and rounds in the Telja-videnie and the jewish-owned media in Russia and all over the world. Yet, when Russian people are attacked, killed and left essentially without most of the right in their own land, once used to be Russian, but raped by the international jewish community first through the revolution financed and executed by the jews, and later by the jews-imposed immigration and multi-culturalism, destroying the world, as per the Protocols, no one will ever report such "boring" news.
The sad thing with the world of the future - it will be dominated by people like you - mutants of a kind, with no cultural or religious background, no homeland, no affinities or bonds, of all mixed ethnicities and races, that will dominate the brave new world of the globalized tomorrow, controlled by select few who make sure they slaves know nothing about the real history. Unless we stop them and open the eyes to the corrupt world we live in today.
Posted by: Allwell at Aug 27, 2008 11:44:07 AM
If you have to buy isk which can exchange for very cheap money, please come to our company.
Posted by: buy isk at Jan 1, 2009 10:46:25 PM
EVE ISK
EVE Online ISK
Buy EVE ISK
Cheap EVE Online ISK
Posted by: aion kina at Mar 18, 2009 2:16:04 AM
Is it realistic?
Posted by: peter at May 14, 2009 9:26:45 PM
it is terrible
Posted by: lily at May 14, 2009 9:27:52 PM
The war is so terrible. Let’s pray for peach together
Posted by: nick at May 14, 2009 9:28:37 PM
